cultural snow: work

Showing posts with label work. Show all posts

Sunday, August 17, 2025

About writing a screenplay

From Then We Came To The End, by Joshua Ferris. How many of us can identify, however uncomfortably, with this?

He had another screenplay about a disaffected and cynical copywriter suffering ennui in the office setting while dreaming of becoming a famous screenwriter, which he claimed was not autobiographical.

Saturday, May 18, 2024

Two examples of people who appear to be in the wrong job. A pub landlord who offers discounts to customers who order by app from their tables, thus discouraging the horrific prospect of bar staff actually having to engage with punters:

I’ve found that not having to be constantly serving people is way better for my mental health. Bar work can be really mentally tiring. This takes the stress away rather than having to constantly interact with different people for eight hours straight.

And Adrian Chiles who, last time I looked, was still purporting to be someone who writes for a living, complaining about apostrophes and then

But, oh Lord, the agonising, circuitous routes around words you’d have to find to construct a bloody sentence.

Which sounds to me like a pretty good definition of Chiles’s chosen, and in his case, well-remunerated trade.

I don’t want to disturb anyone with an image of Chiles, so I’ll just leave this here, wondering whether in a year’s time we’ll have the faintest idea to what it refers:

Saturday, August 12, 2023

About pedantry (again)

From the current Private Eye.

Friday, April 14, 2023

About ChatGPT, again

Self-Googling is dangerous enough, but throwing oneself into the maw of AI is... well...

Tim Footman is a British author, editor, and journalist who has written on a variety of topics, including technology, culture, and history. Some of his notable works include:
"The World According to the Simpsons: What Our Favorite TV Family Says About Life, Love, and the Pursuit of the Perfect Donut" (2006) - a book that explores the cultural impact of the popular TV show "The Simpsons."
"International Guy: Paris, New York, Copenhagen" (2017) - a series of novels co-authored with Audrey Carlan that follows the adventures of a globetrotting male escort.
"The Mindfulness Workout: A Guide to Finding Peace in a Frantic World" (2021) - a self-help book that provides practical tips and exercises to help readers reduce stress and live more mindfully.

PS: Also, from several months later, this:

Friday, July 29, 2022

About job applications

Dr Dickon Edwards, chanteur with 90s Romo outfit Orlando turned bohemian academic, identifies the problem with pretty much everything everywhere:

All job applications ask the same question: 'can you pretend to be normal'?
— Dr Dickon Edwards (@dickon_edwards) July 29, 2022

Tuesday, September 24, 2019

About self-Googling (again)

I wrote a few months ago about the perils of looking for yourself on the magical interwebnets. And now I find a site which has not only replicated the previous “fact” (that I died in 2007) but also wants to retitle my books for me.

Wednesday, June 26, 2019

About self-Googling

In a word, don’t.

Wednesday, March 28, 2018

About Philip Glass

Thursday, November 23, 2017

About knowing capitals

From an otherwise rather sensible article in The Spectator about the uselessness of CVs:

Charles said his own trick was to conduct interviews, normally amiable chats about nonsense, and then at the end ask the applicant to name the capital of Nicaragua. He marked their answers out of ten. Saying: ‘Oh, it’s on the tip of my tongue… Santa something?’ got zero points. A laugh, followed by silence, got three points. Anyone who actually knew the answer (Managua) was eliminated on the grounds of being scary. The correct, ten-point answer was: ‘No, but I could look it up in a moment.’

Scary? Really? Well, that’s me screwed.

(Also, remember that the current Foreign Secretary used to edit The Spectator.)

Tuesday, June 30, 2015

About not using those gay stripes on Facebook

If you’ve been in the vicinity of Facebook over the past few days, you've probably noticed that many people have taken advantage of a little gadget that enables them to overlay their profile images with rainbow stripes, to commemorate the Supreme Court’s decision last week to allow same-sex marriage in all 50 states of the union. Many of my friends, real and virtual, used it.

My immediate reaction was to do the same thing — after all, I support equal marriage, I think the SCOTUS decision is a good thing and I love seeing right-wing Republicans thrashing around in spasms of impotent, moronic fury. But then, as is so often the case, I started overthinking the whole phenomenon. What would I be communicating by tinting my profile? The fact that I’m a decent, egalitarian, non-homophobic, generally liberal, 21st-century sort of person? I’d hope that people already sort of get that already. (There was also the more mundane fact that I was away from my computer when I first noticed the rainbowing, and it would have been a lot of hassle to implement it on my crappy old phone and by the time I got back home I would have felt as if I was playing catch-up.)

But it was interesting seeing some of the reactions to my friends’ assumption of the spectrum. There was an element (jocular, I’m guessing) of “ooh, I thought there was something you weren’t telling us”. That’s harmless in itself but I suppose it’s just the benign end of the assumption that if you support gay rights in any form, that means you’re One Of Them, which sounds barmy but was certainly prevalent 30 years ago. And then I started considering that if people are making assumptions about those who announce their support for the SCOTUS decision in this way, are they also making assumptions about those of us who remain rainbowless? And so I felt like this:

It’s that tipping point where not wearing something – a poppy, a red ribbon, a red nose —can be taken as a statement in and of itself, even if you don’t mean anything by it. Am I by default a homophobe, an ally of the buffoon Scalia and his dimwit Supreme Court rightists? Or did I mean to buy a rainbow from the nice lady outside Waitrose but I only had a fiver and it would have looked weird to ask for change?

At least I don’t now have to contemplate the dilemma described by one of my Facebook friends: “When is the politically correct time to return to a regular (rainbow-free) profile pic?”

PS: And yes, this is my first blog post in two months. What of it? I’ve been busy, doing stuff like this rundown of the best new restaurants in Bangkok. So there.

Sunday, March 02, 2014

Who does he think he is?

(This is prompted in part by a blog post by my friend Namwan, about the moment she realised nobody else had a bloody clue either.)

Very, very occasionally, I go to some sort of social gathering – not a party per se, I’m far too old and tired to do that sort of thing any more – and someone will ask me The Question: “So, what do you do?” It’s so dangerously close to “So, who are you?” that every time I encounter it I find myself teetering on the edge of an existential crisis. And of course, rather than actually dealing with the problem, I construct a banal response-cum-coping-mechanism that will satisfy my new acquaintance’s curiosity without encouraging any further probing.

This wasn’t always a problem. Way back in the mid-90s I was a contestant on A Well-Known TV Quiz Show and between my being accepted and actually recording the episode I went through three different job titles. Confusion inevitably set in so I responded to Magnus Magnusson’s (yes, it was That TV Quiz Show) request for my occupation there was a brief pause and he said “That’s not what I’ve got down here.” It wasn’t the first question I got wrong that day.

Later I had a brief spell when I enjoyed a job title that actually prompted people to say, “Wow, that must be really interesting!” which was nice, although it was also the only job from which I’ve been fired, which wasn’t. And since then I’ve done a number of things that are to a greater or lesser extent connected with words, sometimes juggling two or three of them simultaneously and frankly it’s too much effort to explain it all to someone who’s only really making polite conversation so I just say “I’m a journalist.”

Which isn’t exactly a lie, because I do write things that then appear in periodical publications. But it might serve to mislead someone who thinks that journalists are either battle-hardened crusaders for the truth or sleazy dredgers-up of titillating scandal. I’m neither of those. But there’s also been a shift towards the notion that anyone with a smartphone and a Twitter account is a journalist these days. I’m not one of those either and I do still hold true to the notion that there’s a distinction between news on one hand and Buzzfeed quizzes on the other. And I do have sympathy with the stance of those such as Barney Hoskyns who are campaigning against the tendency to take advantage of journalists and other creatives by asking them to work for nothing “because it’ll get you some exposure.” But that does raise the question of what a journalist’s work is. If I write something and then someone wants to interview me on the radio about it, I might say OK, because it will draw attention to my work. And although I’ll be using my verbal skills I’m not actually writing, so I don’t feel so dirty.

But once of or twice over the past few months I’ve been approached by e-mail by people who are writing pieces about the current situation in Thailand, asking me what the hell’s going on. I respond by e-mail, which makes it seem more like work, but at the same time I know the reason they’ve got in touch is less because I used to write things for The Guardian back in the last decade and more because I happen to be in Bangkok. So since I’m not being a journalist, what if I throw in a few factual errors or spelling mistakes? Is it OK not to be paid then?

Maybe I should just blur a few edges and call myself “a writer”. Because that’s what I do and the term doesn’t insist on payment as part of the deal. Quite the opposite, it seems, as this article in today’s Observer by Robert McCrum suggests. And then if I ever do get off my arse and go to a party we can talk about the gap between wanting to be A Writer and actually Writing.

Although, as Truman Capote would doubtless have argued, I’m not really a writer – I’m a typist.

Monday, May 06, 2013

Branding: realty and reality

I’ve written before about the time of my professional life when I had serious responsibility for what was felt to be A Major Global Brand and how unfortunate it was for everybody concerned that this coincided with the time of my cultural and political life when I read Naomi Klein’s No Logo. I didn’t win that argument, as can be seen from the news that a New York real estate company that has offered staff members a 15% pay rise if they’ll allow themselves to be tattooed with the firm’s logo.

Now, there are a number of interpretations that could be applied to this. New York’s an expensive town, the US economy’s not doing that well, so maybe the employees simply decided that the temporary pain and lasting embarrassment were worth it if the cash were right. They’re estate agents, right? We’ve all seen Glengarry Glen Ross. And then of course it could be that the whole thing is just a light-hearted publicity stunt for the firm, relying on the fact that most news media operations these days don’t have the time or resources for proper bullshit detection.

But let’s take the whole story at face value and believe what the CEO of Rapid Realty says, that his employees were happy to accept the inking because they are “passionate about the brand”. The thing is, I can understand the cold, brutal, business logic of encouraging consumers to believe in a brand, to want to belong, to buy into some kind of collective identity that transcends the empirical quality of the products being sold. That’s where the profit margin lies. But do you really want your staff to be quite so detached from the real world?

Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Stainless stealing

I’m intrigued by this article from Germany about the industry in ghosting PhD theses. It seems that the problem is not so much ethics as one of quality control; if someone with no academic grounding in a subject can knock up a thesis worthy of a doctorate in a matter of weeks, how low exactly is the hurdle that needs to be jumped? The guy actually doing the work – I see a potential film script or a novel in here – has an attitude that veers between cynicism and honesty:

The relationship between professors and their doctoral candidates has often been minimized down to a lazy wave-through... A proper doctoral supervisor would be able to tell that the style and intellectual level of the text could never have come from the person sitting across from him during consultation meetings... If the universities functioned properly, my job wouldn’t exist.

Maybe we’ve got to the stage where the battle’s just not worth fighting any more. A student or journalist might put in all the honest grunt work, but what if their properly attributed source material is itself debased? Are you contaminated if you’re protected by six degrees of plagiarism? I was recently editing an article in which a piece of text set off several alarm bells and when I threw a few sentences into Google, it appeared to be pretty much lifted from a website. The journalist claimed innocence, but did admit that the interview had been done by email. It turns out the interviewee had plagiarised his answers. What do we do when that happens?

PS: Duh, there is already a book (at least partly) about a character who ghostwrites academic material: How I Became a Famous Novelist, by Steve Hely. It’s pretty funny.

Sunday, January 06, 2013

Destroying Orwell

What’s A Creative, exactly? I’ve heard the noun being kicked around in advertising circles (“This is Miles, he’s The Creative who’ll be working on the account.” “We’ll punt it over to The Creatives, see what they can do with it.”) where it seems to exist as an implied rebuke to everyone else in the organisation. How, after all, do you describe someone who isn’t A Creative? An Uncreative? A Destructive?

And while we’re on the subject, is it these Creatives who are expected to read the magazine called Creative Review? Or has it become something akin to The Economist; I wonder how many readers of that publication define themselves as economists. I only ask because a recent feature (in CR, not The Economist) dealt with David Pearson’s cover designs for Penguin’s new editions of George Orwell’s major works. The one that has attracted most attention is for ~~1984~~ Nineteen Eighty-Four, where the title and author’s name are obscured by black foil, and only visible in the right light because the characters are debossed. It’s a bold step, entirely in tune with the theme of Orwell’s novel, but it clearly carries with it certain commercial risks; what if the casual bookshop browser (if they still exist) can’t identify the book? And such concerns are presumably what prompted the following deliciously Gradgrindian comment, from one Graham:

I hate designers that get so keen to impress that they just do something completely impractical like block out all the type. Bottom line: Its a tossy response to a decent brief. The sort of idea a first year graphics student does before realising that they've made something pathetic instead of clever. We can all come up with witty rational for impractical design. The clever thing is when the man on the street can understand the concept and it connects in a genius way. If I was Penguin I'd want my money back. Bollocks to 'covered up'. Start again.

One wonders whether Graham is a Creative, albeit one of a distinctly practical bent. Or is he more likely a bitter Destructive, taking a furtive peek in the Creatives’ magazine and venting all his hatred and resentment on the cool kids down the corridor?

Monday, August 13, 2012

Editing: obsolescence and apathy

Every wage slave cowers under the cloud of potential obsolescence, the fear that changes in technology or economics or consumer behaviour will send us the way of chimney sweeps, tin miners, unicorn wranglers. You may be in some well established profession and think that we’ll always need doctors or accountants but are you sure? Are you really sure?

I work with words. It’s no secret that it’s become considerably harder in the past few years to make cash from writing alone; one EL James doesn’t make a boom. But I don’t just write; I also play with other people’s scribbles, cutting them down to size, shaving off any dangling participles, giving them a little something for the weekend. Even if writers can be persuaded to write for free, very few editors are willing to labour in tedious anonymity unless they’re offered a few shekels. So I was a little nervous when I heard about a software product called Grammarly, which claims to “check your writing for grammar, punctuation, style and much more”; and then relieved to read this piece in The Economist concluding that it’s a bit rubbish, really. Phew.

But of course it’s not technology that’s going to make editors obsolete. We rely not so much on the fact that we know what “literally” and “surreal” and “unique” and “disinterested” really mean, the difference between “which” and “that”, between “infer” and “imply”, where to place that pesky apostrophe; but on other people who don’t know these things, but want to look as if they do. At some point, though, they’ll realise that none of the readers know or care, so why should the writers? And once that happens, editors may as well learn how to sweep chimneys.

Friday, May 18, 2012

Birth, school, work, #Klout

After I deployed those Klout-related ramblings, I was wondering why employers and marketers are starting to pay so much attention to a metric that is apparently so easy to manipulate by retweeting gossip about Pudsey the dog or getting on the right side of someone on that bloody Observer list. And I realised that Klout doesn’t really measure the subject’s online influence – instead, it measures the subject’s desire for online influence, even if it’s an ersatz version of the same. Today, in the decadent West, what few jobs there are involve selling the abstract ideas that we call brands, so the ability and inclination to game one’s own Klout score 20 points higher than it really should be is something of a marketable skill, one that potential employers will hope you can apply to the ethereal gewgaws that they’re trying to flog. They know your enormous Klout score is utter bullshit; and they want a slice of that bullshit.

Similarly, there has been much grumbling over the past couple of decades about the increasing pointlessness of examinations. Exams don’t measure what people know about English or maths or physics any more! They just measure how good people are at passing exams! Which is, in fact, entirely what they want to do. Most employers don’t give a toss whether you can calculate the surface area of a sphere or explain why “a slice of that bullshit” is stretching a metaphor just a little too far. Instead, they want to see the alacrity with which you’ll jump over barrels and through hoops of their devising. “Raise our Klout score,” they bellow, and you only need to respond: “How high?”

Monday, January 30, 2012

Someone’s got to do it

On a recent episode of the weirdly compelling quiz show Pointless, a competing pair delighted the hosts, Alexander Armstrong and Richard Osman, by announcing that they were catastrophe modellers; only to be outdone by the next couple, who make a living by dressing up as zombies. I rather suspect that the next series will feature Professor Kam Wing Chan of the University of Washington, who has apparently “made a career out of correcting people's exaggerated claims about Chinese population statistics”. What’s the oddest job description you’ve had; or that you’ve seen applied to others?

Thursday, May 12, 2011

Known unknowns

An actor involved in one of these super-injunction thingummybobs has – according to The Sun, at least – confessed all to his wife. Which strikes me as odd, because the man’s identity, along with that of the footballer and the other actor and the comedian and the chef, has been all over the web, and has even made it into mainstream media, albeit in the form of terribly coy, nose-tapping innuendo. If his spouse didn’t at least suspect that something was up, surely one of her friends must have twigged. I don’t want to kick her when she’s down, but she must be a terribly incurious woman.

You see, the whole point of these injunctions is not to stop people knowing about the moral mishaps of the rich and famous: it’s to stop the *wrong* people knowing. And this is something that goes way back. The Abdication Crisis of 1936 gripped the attention of the British masses once it became public, but the upper classes had known all about Edward’s unsuitable girlfriend for some time, and had been happy to gossip about the constitutional ramifications, provided the hoi-polloi didn’t know what was going on. Such information might create havoc, weaken their moral fibre, don’t you know?

I first got came to understand this social distinction in the world of celebrity tittle tattle in the early 1990s, at about the time it was beginning to fall apart. I’d started my first proper job, in a legal publishing company, which meant that I was for the first time operating in close proximity to people who knew where the bodies were buried. I got wind of Paddy Ashdown’s tarnished halo some time before The Sun splashed it, and also heard some startling rumours about a couple of then-Cabinet ministers. These were pretty analogue days, so the tales were literally word-of-mouth. But I was standing by the fax machine when the Camillagate transcripts came over from Australia. Technology had done away with the social apartheid of gossip, to extent that even after the injunctors have joined Andrew Marr in realising the sheer daftness of their position, they will be remembered not for illicit shagging, but for using their wealth and status to hush up said shagging, which looks far, far worse.

Camilla herself was doubtless embarrassed by the publication of her phone messages, but she realised she could do little about it. So she backed off, bided her time, and is now the Duchess of Cornwall. And she’s making speeches lauding the freedom of the press. Maybe one day [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] will do the same.

Friday, April 01, 2011

White suit man

I was offered some work the other day; it would have involved covering a forthcoming election in Asia, which sounds terribly exciting, all very Graham Greene, sipping a whisky and soda while waiting for a sweaty man who smokes cheroots and is found stabbed to death on the bidet of my hotel room at the end of Chapter 7. Proper foreign correspondent stuff; and bear it mind I spend much of time in an eco-system where foreign correspondents are at the top of the pyramid, and everybody wants a little of their raffish glamour to rub off on them (which is why most outlets of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club are packed with people who write press releases for exhaust pipe manufacturers, while the foreign correspondents themselves are out corresponding).

Except that rather than the chance of being a proper fo-co and reporting coolly and objectively (with just a dash of the aforementioned raffishness) about the election, the task proffered to me was to write a blog that would be favourable to the incumbent who – according to his Wikipedia page at least – is something of a dodgy geezer. The offer, I should stress, came not from a conventional news organisation, but a ‘strategic communication’ company, which should have alerted me. Rather than spend several days weighing up the ethical ins and outs of the thing, I just said no thanks within minutes.

But why exactly did I turn it down? Well, the fact that the guy for whom I would have been shilling is of dubious probity certainly entered into it, but that doesn’t necessarily mean my motives were entirely pure and selfless. I’ve been watching all the people who’ve done business with Gaddafi over years furiously trying to rewrite history, and none of them comes out of the mess looking good. So maybe it’s not that I didn’t want to help a crook; just that I didn’t want it widely known that I was helping a crook. My biggest fear was getting found out. Complicity is bad; embarrassment is worse.

I could, of course, have gone in on the pretext of doing the job, and then blown the whistle on the whole story, thus provoking anguished think pieces on the dangerous grey area between journalism and political PR and perhaps a sarky footnote in Private Eye. But the person who asked me to do it is an old friend, so he’d have suffered for my high-minded subterfuge. Moreover, whereas my moral courage ebbs and flows, my physical bravery is a tiny, stagnant puddle. While the guns and grenades and catapults were tearing big holes in Bangkok last year, I was at home in the suburbs, drinking tea and following the whole thing on Twitter. If I’d taken the job, I might have been duffed up, or worse. I’ve read The Last King of Scotland, you know; these things never end well.

But really, at the heart of it is the fact that I’m very bad at lying, at pretending, especially at feigning enthusiasm. (On the other hand, today of all days, maybe I’m making up all of the above, even the bit about the bidet, like Annie Rhiannon does when she pretends to go to Tibet and America and Wales.)

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Window of opportunity

The best period to find work as an editor occurs within a very specific time frame in the twilight of a culture: after the point at which most people have stopped knowing how to write, but before the point at which nobody really cares any more. When the barbarians are at the gate, but they haven’t yet found the flowerpot under which you hide the key.